Wallis & Steevens Water Cart in 1' scale

I'm getting close to the top coat stage of this scratch build project now.

Complied with the early original design option of using wood for the top areas and tank lid. I've used mahogany where they probably used elm?-

I was glad to get past the job of soldering the individual letters onto the tank end plates-

Not perfect, as a couple of letters had moved slightly and I had to make the Ampersands (& ) from bits in 3mm height lettering, but hopefully won't show from behind the wheels. A reasonable representation of the 'cast in' pattern of the original and looks better after a coat of 2 part etch primer-

Most of the tank lid furniture is made from nickel silver and fixed with 1/32" rivets-

More finishing to do on the woodwork, then it's ready for the drab matt green top coat.

There are several images in my album which covers the work up to now if interested.

I'll add to this 'thread' as I progress from now and will be dependant on progress of the painting and assembly of my 1' modded Minnie, to which this Cart will be attached to.

Regards

Edited By Richard S2 on 17/12/2020 13:30:49

That's beautiful. Are the letters commercially available or did you make them somehow and looking at the album how did you do the wheel hubs, are they cast?

William.

Great workmanship I just looked through what you had done to get to this stage and it does seem a shame to have painted it, but when you are trying to get it looking like the original I understand why.

Top notch work Richard!

Thanks all for the positive responses. I replied to William via PM same day.

Yep!, bit of a shame Derek, but needs must. Made fair progress on the main paint and picked out the raised lettering. Rather intense concentration trying to paint these with a 6 bristle sable brush and a x5 dioptra Loupe. This is the only pic at the moment-

Need to get some more matt varnish for final coat before proper assembly. Reasonably pleased with the finish considering my tired old Airbrush (Badger 200) is now 45 years old.

Regards

The only comment I make on your lettering is this: To anyone versed in the history of lettering design, the style you have chosen does not match the date of the original. Unless of course, your water cart was made after about 1927. In typeface terms, it might be Futura, or Spartan, or one or two others - I would need to see other letters to be more certain.

I wonder if there is enough interest in this 'arcane corner' of design history (from an ME point of view) for an article about matching the letters to the job?

Regards - Tim (who once, long ago, designed typefaces for Amstrad)

Sorry - twice again!

Tim

Edited By Tim Stevens on 03/01/2021 14:57:28

Thank you for your observations/contribution.

So continuing with this reasonable representation of the brand's model, I managed to dull the finish on the shiny wheel tread faces and now seem to look better-

Nearly finished, and just the Drawabar to make that will replace the shafts. It can then be hooked up to the Modded Minnie TE-

Now the Minnie T/Engine is back in one piece on 'all fours', I've finished fabricating the alternative drawbar for this cart. Trial fit -

Just the painting of the drawbar and some plumbing/hose parts to do and it will be finished.

I've dabbled trying to recreate realistic period signage with Inkscape and found it to hard to identify modern fonts to do authentic ye olde lettering, for 3D and ordinary paper printing. I found it necessary to mix and match letters from various fonts, and to individually modify certain characters and punctuation by editing the splines of the underlying glyphs. Tedious and imperfect.

Although I suspect many early cast-metal signs used home-made fonts that don't match anything standard exactly, I'm certain part of the problem was my general ignorance of font families and not knowing how styles changed over time.

Any advice on finding or making period correct fonts would be most welcome.

Dave

Nice work

H

Good specimen of the appropriate font, here: **LINK**

http://www.whoisgeorgemills.com/2010/07/wallis-steevens-george-uncle-dudley-and.html

MichaelG.

Thank you. I did use images of full sized examples for research initially and my available stock of lettering was close enough for me.

I had no intention of making more lettering to a presupposed idea of what it may have looked like around 1900.

So for anyone who is bothered by it, can peruse the images of a full size Cart example on this - LINK - for another comparison. I can't post them (or others) into this Topic, as they are copyrighted.

They look close enough to me a good job Richard. Many times when modeling something if it is built to exact scale it just does not look right so a little artistic licence is required to make it look correct.

.

No criticism from me, Richard !

… I think you’ve done a superb job.

MichaelG.